FINANCIAL COMMUNICATION: FRAMEWORK AND PRACTICES - 2019 EDITION

27 7  z ARCHIVING ANDTRANSPARENCY OF REGULATORY INFORMATION Issuers are required to post their regulatory information on their website as soon as it is disseminated 36 . Under the terms of article 17.1 of the Market Abuse Regulation, issuers are required to post and maintain on their website, for a period of at least five years, all insider information they are required to disclose publicly. The documents listed below must be available for a period of ten years: n annual financial reports; n half-yearly financial reports; n reports on payments to governments 37 . The ESMA’s Questions and Answers of October 22, 2015 relating to the Transparency Directive specify that reports that were made publicly available less than five years before November 26, 2015 must remain publicly available for ten years (as from the date the reports were originally published). The AMF also recommends that companies store regulatory information that is sensitive, but that does not constitute insider information and was not included in their annual and half-yearly financial reports, for a sufficient length of time. In addition, the DILA (Direction de l’information légale et administrative – French office of legal and administrative information) provides for the centralised storage and archiving of regulatory information on its website: www.info-financiere.fr , for a period of ten years. TheTransparency Directive (Directive 2013/50/EU), supplemented by Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1437, provides for a centralised archive storage facility at EU level (the European Electronic Access Point), the objective of which is to facilitate both access to financial information and the comparability of companies’ financial statements. As such, ESMA issued the final version of the RegulatoryTechnical Standards (RTS) for the European Single Electronic Format on December 18, 2017 38 . This format must be used by all issuers to prepare their annual financial reports as from 2020. From then on, all annual financial statements must be prepared in XHTML format. Where appropriate, IFRS consolidated financial statements must be labelled using XBRL tags (for primary financial statements: balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement and, as of 2022, certain information in the notes to the financial statements). Access to regulatory information is set out in Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1437 of May 19, 2016. 36 – Article 221-3 II of the AMF General Regulations; see also section 1.3.3 of AMF Position/ Recommendation no. 2016-08 – Guide to ongoing disclosures and the management of insider information, and section 14 of AMF Position/ Recommendation DOC-2016-05 – Guide to periodic disclosures by companies listed on a regulated market, updated on March 6, 2019. 37 – For more information on these three reports, see articles L. 451-1-2 I and L. 451-1-2 III of the French Monetary and Financial Code, and article L. 225-102-3 VII of the French Commercial Code, respectively. 38 – ESMA, Final report on the Regulatory Technical Standard (RTS) on the European Single Electronic Format, no. 32-60-204, December 18, 2017.